Who Is Favored To Win The 2024 Presidential Election?

On Friday, Aug. 23, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he was suspending his campaign for president and endorsed former President Donald Trump. The endorsement from Kennedy, at 4 percent in the popular vote in our forecast, has the ability to give Trump a crucial boost in battleground states. Our model forecast a 4-in-10 chance that Kennedy’s vote share in November would be larger than the margin for either Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris in at least one decisive state. Both candidates will likely welcome that probability going to zero.

It is difficult, however, to provide a quick analysis of RFK’s impact on the race. On the one hand, his impact on our polling average is small and Kennedy’s voters mostly otherwise look like strong partisans. But it is not so easy for a forecasting model to react to such a sharp change in the race, mainly because it needs data (from the polls) to do so. Although you and I know that Kennedy endorsed Trump, which should in theory help him a little, the model does not have access to that information until it sees polling data showing such a shift. Programming the model a different way would require us to speculate, mostly with ad hoc rationalization, about the future trajectory of the race. We prefer to leave such forecasting to the model. Readers should expect our model to react to this news over the next week, if Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump does in fact change the polls.

538’s forecast is based on a combination of polls and campaign “fundamentals,” such as economic conditions, state partisanship and incumbency. It’s not meant to “call” a winner, but rather to give you a sense of how likely each candidate is to win. Check out our methodology to learn exactly how we calculate these probabilities.

—G. Elliott Morris